In September 1912, Lewis and Matilda Fink were among a group of shop owners in Phoenixville who joined together to found Congregation B’nai Jacob, the oldest synagogue in Chester County. A century later, their 66-year-old grandson will serve as master of ceremonies at a gala dinner celebrating the Conservative synagogue's milestone anniversary.

Graham Spanier, the Jewish former president of Penn State University whose parents fled Nazi Germany and who had been a big supporter of the campus Hillel, is now facing criminal charges. He was fired last year in the wake of the child sex abuse scandal that centered around former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.

While Jewish institutions in the Philadelphia area emerged from the recent storm relatively unscathed, such was not the case in New York and New Jersey, where the total cost of the devastation is still being assessed.

WASHINGTON Mitt Romney’s record as a moderate Republican governor would seem to have made him ideally suited to peel off Jewish votes from President Barack Obama. The problem is that he spent much of the past half decade running from that past. Now, however, as the campaign draws to a close, Romney is ditching his “severely conservative” primary persona, as...